“I also thought that if there were a vote to leave the EU, the outward-looking, internationalist face of modern multicultural Britain would win through: that although we would leave the EU, we would remain in the single market to which the manifesto of every major political party at the last election committed us – a market on which our prosperity as a nation, and our ability to raise the taxes to pay for public services, is founded.”

But Phillips was today accused by some of not being a true Leaver - because he wanted the UK to remain in the single market.

Sky News’ Faisal Islam pointed out that if critics of Phillips’ were going to discount him as a true Brexiter, they could not claim to include him in their mandate of 17.4 million people - nor other people like him.

The presenter said that instead it was “unknown millions” who backed a ‘Hard Brexit’ and that all ‘Leave’ voters could not be used as a bloc mandate.

Phillips himself wrote just weeks before his resignation that while “the government may have a mandate for Brexit, it has no mandate at all for what it should look like”.

He wrote in the Guardian: “Hard Brexit, with all the damage it will do, has seemingly become the received wisdom, without any mandate at all from the British people, and seemingly without any challenge – at least until this week.”